How Renegade ARGs Poached the World of Lonelygirl15

Ever since the launch of Lonelygirl15 with Bree’s first video posted on YouTube called “First Blog/Dorkiness Prevails” on June 16, 2006, the internet-based Web show that instigated much controversy surrounding the authenticity of the Web, transformed YouTube, which was initially merely a video sharing site, into a legitimate story-telling medium. As the series finally concluded in August 2008, it was time to ask: how successful was Lonelygirl15 in creating a fan-based story?

Accordingly, this paper will investigate how Lonelygirl15, the Web show that was launched in the form of vlogs (video blogs) and quickly gave birth to numerous fan-driven side plots, not to mention related alternate reality games (ARGs), exhibits a type of materiality conducive to performative narratives that affords the collaborative development of fiction on Web 2.0 platforms. The materiality of the medium, as defined by Katherine Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer, is the interaction of the physical characteristics of the work with its signifying strategies. In other words, according to Hayles, this notion of materiality, while centered on the artifact, extends beyond the individual object, for its physical characteristics are the result of the social, cultural, and technological processes that brought into being. Authors/creators appropriate whatever technological means (print or digital) available to them to foreground and intensify the performativity of their works. Narratives that emerge as a result of the performative activities of the reader (user, player, or audience) as she interacts with the work are referred to as performative narratives.

Web 2.0, on the other hand, in its broadest sense, refers to the transition of the World Wide Web from a producer/consumer model to one where user-generated content, community, and meta-content (such as rating) are the key function of applications. Lonelygirl15, as a show born within Web 2.0 platforms, not only facilitates fan interaction on its site and forums, but also allows fans to interact with the characters on various platforms, for example, through chat clients, IRC channels, text messages, and even arrange face-to-face interactions in real-world locations. In addition to engaging in meta-communication with each other about the show and interacting with its characters, the fans, as a community, solve puzzles, comment on the videos posted on the Lonelygirl15 site, create their own art work about the show, make their own video responses, enter contests, and even affect the development of the story. Similar to the novel Tristram Shandy (a work which would not have been possible to be produced prior to the typographic capabilities introduced by the movable type printing press), Lonelygirl15, too, would have been a technical impossibility prior to the inception of YouTube in 2005, as well as and other internet technologies (some of which were founded even prior to YouTube). Lonelygirl15, then, as a show that evolves around its community that actively takes part in the development of its story, presents an interesting case of a performative narrative appropriate for the materiality of the Web 2.0 platforms that are emerging on the Internet today, and, as such, points towards how narrative may evolve in the near future.

Despite the promise of a collaborative fiction based on its community, in which fans can influence the story by modifying the storyline and interacting with its characters, the concern for legitimizing Lonelygirl15 as a sustainable story, along with the attempt at rendering YouTube as a legitimate story-telling platform, forced its creators to maintain control over the Lonelygirl15 brand and the story development, an act that eventually ossified the possibilities of this grassroots initiative into the likes of others which grew out of Hollywood.

Spectacular Subcultures of Second Life: Looking Beneath the Lulz

Second Life Community Convention, 2008

Julian Dibbell notes in his article in Wired entitled "Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World" published in February 2008, that although willfully antisocial behaviors in MMOs date back to the text-based virtual worlds such as LambdaMOO, griefing that take place in virtual worlds these days articulate a sense of purpose. Accordingly, he claims that griefing is "[n]o longer just an isolated pathology, [it] has developed into a full-fledged culture." Explaining that the ultimate purpose of Goons and Channers is to undermine that the Internet is serious business, he quotes ^ban^, the leader of Patriotic Nigras, who reiterates the all-to-well-known reason why griefers do what they do: in particular, for the lulz (laughs)...and that because most of them are psychotic. While this is a good enough reason to explain away their activities on a superficial level, I argue, it falls considerably short in identifying the primary reason that mobilizes these groups into what they have ultimately become. Although these activities are grief play in essence, no doubt they have broader consequences that exceed the boundaries of what Johan Huizanga identifies as the magic circle in Homo Ludens, and, which ultimately affects the culture at large. As such, these groups have become legitimate subcultures of a symbolic order.

Adopting Dick Hebdige's definition of subcultures, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, I maintain that these groups display their objections and contradictions to hegemony in a spectacular fashion. In other words, as Hebdige explains "the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style. The objections are lodged, the contradictions are displayed...at profoundly superficial level of appearances: that is, at the level of signs" (Hebdige 17). Accordingly, he contends that the struggle between different discourses, different definitions and meanings within ideology is always a struggle within signification, a struggle which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life. Subcultures, for Hebdige, represent "noise," as opposed to sound, in that they are interferences in the orderly sequences. Thus the signifying power of the spectacular subculture is not just a metaphor for the potential anarchy out somewhere, but is rather an actual mechanism of semantic disorder, or what Hebdige refers to as "a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation" (90). Our task, then, becomes to discern the hidden messages inscribed in code on the glossy surface of style, to trace them out as 'maps of meaning' which obscurely re-present the very contradictions they are designed to resolve or conceal.

My research in Second Life primarily aims to trace out these maps meanings beneath the cheeky activities, offensive builds, shocking machinimas, and grid crashes for which the griefing groups are notorious and reveal their connection to the culture at large. Although not all griefing groups engage in similar activities, I argue that these activities achieve what Hebdige refers to as "temporarily blockage in the system of representation" within Second Life. Despite Goons' claim that they do not engage in any hardcore griefing in Second Life and their argument that they provide a much-needed criticism to Second Life culture and society at large, their activities, essentially, attack the content of the world and ruin other people's experience of the world. Precisely because these attacks on the content undermine Linden Lab's promise of providing a second life enjoyable to everyone, they are breaking the system, albeit on a symbolic level. Similar to the tactics used by spectacular subcultures, where objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in the punk scene and the perverse and the abnormal were valued intrinsically, Goons use illicit iconography of sexual fetishism in their machinimas (such as paraphernalia of bondage and pornography) and adopt socially offensive discourse (i.e. cyberterrorism and communism symbols) to elicit a certain spectacular effect. In relation to the punks of the late 70s, Hebdige explains that "[t]he signifier (swastika) had been willfully detached from the concept (Nazism) it conventionally signified, and although it had been re-positioned...within an alternative subcultural context, its primary value and appeal derived precisely from its lack of meaning: from its potential for deceit" (117). According to him, the appropriation of this type of symbolism leads subcultures to represent "noise," not "sound." More importantly, Hebdige argues that mass media provide these groups with substantive images of their own lives contained and framed by the ideological discourses which surround and situate it (85). In a similar fashion, Goons adopt tropes that attempt to undermine significant cultural icons in order to construct an identity counter to what they perceive to be the assumed norm. They remove this offensive symbolism (AIDS, rape signs, BDSM scenes, and so on) from their real-life cultural context and use them to embrace the identity of the "cyberterrorist," a label all-too-willingly bestowed upon them by some bloggers which represent the media.

The manner in which the activities of Patriotic Nigras (PN) and the recently emerged group DISSENTION, go beyond merely offending the silent majority and temporarily block the system of representation of Second Life in a much more substantial way. Their activities actually aim to break the system via poaching its medium and making it temporarily unusable. PNs, which, according to their slogan, have been "ruining your Second Life since 2006," pride themselves in carrying on the work of the pioneering griefers such as Plastic Duck and aim to inspire a new generation of griefers dedicated to fight AIDs, racism, and the Furries who engage in alternative sexual lifestyles. They consider themselves as an invasion group of Second Life, dedicated to producing lulz out of Second Life residents as well as what they consider as their main target, furfags (a derogatory term they use for Furries). The warlike undertones of their stated declaration posted on their Web site make it amply clear that their goal is the invasion of Second Life exclusively for the lulz. Accordingly, in addition to simple trolling, entering an area to be annoying, starting arguments between other people, or using clever scripts to frame others for griefing for the purpose of getting them banned, PNs engage in sim-scale raiding that involves filling the region with loud, noisy and/or annoying prims, using the Second Life particle system that allows them to spam everyone's screen with any sort of shocking image or offensive language, disrupting high profile events, or even launching good-old-fashion gray goo attacks in-world. Although the act of griefing appears to be a destructive power within Second Life and other virtual worlds, I argue that, with its offensive symbolism and styles, the performative activities of griefer groups designate a vernacular creativity that establish the cultural capital necessary to constitute them as a legitimate subculture in which (as it had been in the punk culture) spectacle takes a prominent role. Accordingly, this presentation will investigate how grief play becomes an agent of the cultural production while maintaining its status as an effective tool in power struggle. Griefers, I contend, employ various acts of subversion clad in the rhetoric of play to systematically explore the boundaries of games and platforms.

Spectacular Interventions of Second Life: Goon Culture, Griefing, and Disruption in Virtual Spaces

Cultures of Virtual Worlds, 2008
University of California, Irvine

The open-source environment of Second Life, a computer-generated world created by Linden Lab, affords one of the most attractive spaces for content creation that elicits performative acts which, ultimately, result in the construction of its world. Second Life provides tools for building, scripting, and creating tools that render the world a more flexible platform. But the same openness also facilitates disruptive behavior and poaching of the environment in negative ways, such as creating offensive builds with objectionable symbolism (i.e. swastikas, penises, etc), slowing down the functionality of certain regions, launching grey goo attacks (which generally take the form of self-replicating penises).

Referred to as griefing, these activities are mostly attributed to certain groups such as W-Hat, Voted 5, and Patriatic Nigras. These groups adopt tropes that attempt to undermine significant cultural icons or events in order to construct an identity counter to what they perceive to be the assumed norm. As such, they use illicit iconography of sexual fetishism (such as paraphernalia of bondage and pornography) in their machinima movies and adopt socially offensive discourse (i.e. AIDS and rape signs, swastikas) to elicit a certain spectacular effect. But they remove this symbolism from its real-life cultural context and use them to embrace the identity of the "cyber-terrorist," a label all-too-willingly bestowed upon them by bloggers. As such, their activities comprise tactics used by spectacular subcultures discussed by Dick Hebdige and involve poaching of the textual space of Second Life.

Griefing Spaces and Disruptive Multi-Platform Narratives

National Communication Association, 2007

Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide argues that the electronic age instigated an era of media convergence where old and new media intersect and the power of the media producer and that of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. His conception of media convergence is not merely the technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same platform, but is rather a phenomenon that represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information, make new connections among dispersed media content, and ultimately produce new texts. Therefore, Jenkins contends that convergence brings about a participatory culture where fans rewrite their favorite shows as fanzines, readers blogs their daily experiences, and gamers personalize their videogames by creating their own challenges.

Media convergence and the participatory culture it elicits bring to mind an important question in terms of literary theory: how does media convergence affect how we read and write in an age where narratives seamlessly migrate from one medium to another and the boundaries between consumers and producers are blurred? Already, hybrid forms of story-telling that offer immersive and interactive environments have emerged in which readers are expected to perform activities that go beyond the mere act of reading. These forms consistently challenge the existence of narrative and force us to reevaluate our pre-existing notions of what a story is. My presentation explores the formation of narratives in Second Life, a rapidly growing massively multiplayer online game.

Second Life provides one of the most attractive Web 2.0 platforms for content creation. The open-source environment provided by Linden Lab, its parent company, which allows the metaverse to be built by its users, provides optimal conditions for textual poaching which leads to the construction of multi-platform narratives. Its users employ blogs, forums, IRC channels, YouTube, Snapzilla, Second Life Safari (a section of Something Awful Web site dedicated to stories of Second Life) to create and perpetuate many stories that are originally born within the world of Second Life. In multi-platform narratives the stories are extended to various diverse platforms, each one unique but all complementary, thereby leaving the formation of texts to the user/reader and, more importantly, necessitating the redefinition of textual space. Using the arguments made by Anna Gunder, Katherine Hayles, and Henry Jenkins, I will investigate the production and consumption of narratives as performative acts that form the text and ultimately elicit different meanings of Second Life.

Collaborative Storytelling: Performing the Narrative of the Griefer

Second Life Community Convention, 2007

As World Wide Web transforms into Web 2.0 in the era of media convergence and becomes a full-fleshed computing platform serving Web applications to end users, it goes without saying that the traditional concept of the narrative born out of the print culture becomes inadequate, if not useless. Already, hybrid forms of storytelling that offer immersive and interactive environments have emerged in which readers are expected to perform activities that go beyond the mere act of reading. This paper will explore the transformation of narrative in the age of media convergence where the power of the media producer and that of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.

As a Web 2.0 platform, Second Life provides one of the most attractive environments for content creation, including stories, where users' performative acts facilitate the construction of different aspects of the metaverse. Moreover, its open-source environment provides optimal conditions for textual poaching which ultimately results in the construction of multi-platform narratives. In multi-platform narratives the stories are extended onto various diverse platforms, each one unique but all complementary. Such an erratic arrangement of narrative bits leaves the formation of texts to the user/reader and, more importantly, necessitates the redefinition of textual space. This paper will investigate the production and consumption of the narrative of the griefer as a performative act that forms various texts on different platforms that embody different characteristics and, ultimately, elicit different meanings of Second Life.

Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia

MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age, 2007

The developments that emerged in digital era instigated a transformation in how the text is perceived in New Media. The malleability of the digital platform afforded the text with structural flexibility that necessitated a revised outlook on established narrative forms. More specifically, digital narrative came to embody a fragmented, non-linear structure that lacks beginning and closure. I would like to suggest that these structural changes require an alternative approach to storytelling in which spatial exploration of the text acquires precedence over plot development. Foregrounding the spatiality of the narrative allows the digital platform to transform the text into an open environment in which the user can enter and explore at her leisure. Ultimately, the temporal progress of the digital narrative is contingent upon how the reader/user decides to proceed spatially through the text. This model allows for the construction of the variations of the same narrative by different users at the same time or by the same user at different times.

To make the case for spatial narrative, I would like to examine how spatiality affects narrative development in M.D. Coverley’s hypertext story Califia. Califia is about the hunt for the treasure of California, narrated by Augusta, Kaye and Calvin. Each of the narrators follows a different road which offers different clues to the reader. But the reader is encouraged to leave the footsteps of the narrators and follow her own lead. The hypertext story takes a topological approach to narrative in which the words bear close relationship to the world that is being narrated. In addition, the narrative is also layered with images, music, and fake documents that include family trees of the narrators, maps of California (both ancient and recent) and chronology of events.

Alternative Approaches to Narrative in New Media Forms: Mapping out Narrative in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl

National Communication Association, 2005

As new media emerge with developing technologies, the nature of communication takes on new forms that favor different sensory modalities than the ones employed by previously existing media. The task of meaning-making in various textualities, then, requires a media-specific analysis that explores the possibilities and the constraints of each medium in shaping texts. Marshall McLuhan characterizes the advent of the phonetic alphabet as a technology that marks a significant shift in the history of civilization. Pre-literate societies display an audile-tactile bias where experiences result in an organic whole in which multiple sensory modalities are stimulated simultaneously. The invention of the phonetic alphabet, however, has initiated a continuous drive in the Western world toward the separation of senses, of functions, and of operations. The neutral world of the eye, favoring linear logic that emphasizes cause and effect and hierarchical connections, has replaced the magical world of the ear which displays an interaction amongst the senses. The advent of electronic technology, due to the speed with which it can transmit information, moves us back to the auditory world of the simultaneous and over-all awareness by retranslating the fragmentation instigated by the alphabet technology into interdependence on a global scale. McLuhan contends that this retranslation back to the oral modes of perception creates confusion for the Western man who is now torn between the claims of visual and auditory cultures and structures.

I intend to demonstrate how Shelley Jackson's hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl; or a Modern Monster is a work that illustrates this anxiety that comes about as a result of the emerging communication environments in the digital age. The progress of narrative relies on the constant interplay between the audile-tactile modes of perception and the visual logic of the alphabetic era. Patchwork Girl utilizes the female body as a narrative strategy to re-tell the story of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. On one level, the work establishes a strong affiliation between the female monster's fragmented body and the electronic text. In this sense, the female body becomes the medium through which writing becomes the extension of the human senses. On another level, Patchwork Girl structurally recreates the fragmentation resulted during the alphabetic era by resurrecting the ideology of the print text by way of extensive borrowing from various print sources. The result is a disassembled story waiting to be restitched into a whole by the reader. Through its readings, the text is able to create multiple totalities out of the fragmentation that came about from linear and hierarchical perception that has dominated print culture. In order to reconstruct the story, the reader has to alternate between the narrative whose progression is determined by the body, and the hierarchy of the visual order introduced by the structural aids such as charts and trees which establish a meaningful connection between the lexia.

Construction of Spatial Narratives in M. D. Coverley's Califia

MIT4: Work of Stories, 2005
Stories & Identities 4

The developments that emerged in digital era instigated a transformation in how the text is perceived in New Media. The malleability of the digital platform afforded the text with structural flexibility that necessitated a revised outlook on established narrative forms. More specifically, digital narrative came to embody a fragmented, non-linear structure that lacks beginning and closure.

I would like to suggest that these structural changes require an alternative approach to storytelling in which spatial exploration of the text acquires precedence over plot development. Foregrounding the spatiality of the narrative allows the digital platform to transform the text into an open environment in which the user can enter and explore at her leisure. Ultimately, the temporal progress of the digital narrative is contingent upon how the reader/user decides to proceed spatially through the text. This model allows for the construction of the variations of the same narrative by different users at the same time or by the same user at different times.

To make the case for spatial narrative, I would like to examine how spatiality affects narrative development in M.D. Coverley's hypertext story Califia. Califia is about the hunt for the treasure of California, narrated by Augusta, Kaye and Calvin. Each of the narrators follows a different road which offers different clues to the reader. But the reader is encouraged to leave the footsteps of the narrators and follow her own lead. The hypertext story takes a topological approach to narrative in which the words bear close relationship to the world that is being narrated. In addition, the narrative is also layered with images, music, and fake documents that include family trees of the narrators, maps of California (both ancient and recent) and chronology of events.

The Relevance of the Novel in the Age of New Media: Transforming Interface to Interspace in Tristram Shandy and The Glide Project

International Narrative Conference, 2005

Very much like print and film, the rise of digital media instigated a radical attempt to redefine the boundaries of previously established art forms and how they define narrative. The emergence of print as a form of mass media facilitated the rise of what is now called the novel, a literary form which simultaneously challenged and shamelessly incorporated its own predecessors by virtue of its own self-reflexivity. As its name suggests, the trajectory of the novel is that of perpetual redefinition, leading not only to a constant structural renewal, but also to a fluid content that attempts to capture life itself.

At the brink of digital revolution marked by information overload, the novel is ever more relevant to New Media and its related art forms. Fiction in digital environments fulfills the vision of the novel in unexpected ways and realizes what writers such as Cervantes and Sterne set out to accomplish five centuries ago when pushing the limits of the print medium. I argue that the information superhighway created in the era of the Internet is yet another manifestation of the Sterne's desire to capture every minute detail of life with extensive digressions. In a way, digression is the trade mark of New Media art forms in which the user is allowed to wander through the text and explore it at her own pace. Consequently, the notion of conclusion in its traditional sense becomes redundant.

More importantly, the malleable nature of the digital medium provides fiction with a formal flexibility that enables it to incorporate different modes of story-telling. Thus multimedia, a concept which is also present in experimental print fiction, has become second nature to many art forms of New Media. The combination of image, text, and sound in Hypermedia fiction evoke an alternative vision of the future of story-telling.

This paper will argue that the novel continues to retain its relevancy in providing a paradigm for conceptualizing new modes of expression. By analyzing Glide, an online interactive narrative produced by Diana Slattery, Daniel O'Neil and Bill Brubaker, I will explore the ways in which digital environments incorporate and extend the underlying premises of the novel and how the malleability of the medium facilitates the integration of distinct genres and art forms.

Hypertextual Readings of Pale Fire: How new is the Digital Text?

Modern Language Association, 2003
Nabokov after Lolita: Pnin and Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire explores the possibilities of hypertextual narrative in the print medium. The book's four-part structure comprising of a Forward signed by Charles Kinbote, the long poem "Pale Fire" by John Shade, Kinbote's line-by-line commentary to the poem, and his Index, forces the reader to adapt alternative reading strategies to cope with the non-linear narrative structure of the novel.

As early as the end of the Forward, Nabokov has already thrown the reader from one section to the other with Kinbote's dizzying page references so that the reader is not clear where his or her reading will lead to or even whether to follow the suggested path of the printed text or follow Nabokov's lead from one page to the other to make any kind of sense out of this textual maze.

Demanding the reading of a multitude of concurrent texts, the hypertext encourages a topographical writing and reading style that subverts any notion of spatial or temporal linearity and requires the reader to develop an interactive relationship with the text. In existence since the medieval codex, this type of textuality finds itself at home in the electronic medium. The electronic text undermines the hierarchical structuring of texts as characterized by the table of contents while defying the canonical rules and formats solidified with the advent of print.

Nabokov, in Pale Fire, exploits this hypertextual approach in fiction. He ingeniously arranges the constituents of this so-called edited work, i.e. the Forward, the poem, the commentary and the Index in such a way that any linear reading is undermined and that there is no hierarchical organization amongst the sections. John Shade's poem, the primary source regenerating the commentary, retreats to the background and leaves the spotlight to the commentary. It is up to the reader to take an active role in constructing the novel by simultaneously gathering information from the disparate yet integrally intertwined sections. Charles Kinbote, in this sense becomes the parodical representation of the hypertext reader. His reading, as exemplified in the Forward, the commentary, and the Index, violates and destroys the poem. He aggressively superimposes his own reading on Shade's poem to construct a totally different and even a hostile text. Seen from this perspective, Pale Fire is about the problem of its own reading.